In late December, two days after Novsky's arrest, the telephone rang in Darmolatov's house. It was exactly 3:00 A.M. The receiver was picked up by Darmolatov's groggy wife, a pregnant Tartar with a high, bulging belly. At the other end there was only a terrifying silence that makes one's blood freeze. The woman replaced the receiver and burst into tears. From then on, the telephone in his apartment was muffled by multicolored feather pillows covered with flashy decorative motifs full of the flamboyant noise of Tartar fairs, while beside the desk, burdened with manuscripts, dictionaries, and books that he was translating "for his nerves”, stood a cardboard suitcase, packed and ready for sudden departure. Once, emboldened by vodka, he had even shown this suitcase to a poet-informer: on top of the warm knitted sweater and flannel underwear lay a leather-bound copy of Ovid's elegies in Latin. In those days, the verses of that famous exile must have sounded to him like Pushkin's motto about his own poetic destiny.
At the beginning of the next year, he traveled to Georgia; in May, he published a cycle of poems entitled Tiflis in One's Hands; in September, he was placed on the Writers' Request List and received, through an order signed by Gorky, a pair of trousers, a lined coat, and a beaver hat. (It seems that Darmolatov refused this fur hat because of its "hetman appearance.” Aleksei Maksimovich had insisted he shouldn't be so choosy! In light of all the versions in circulation about this event, it is difficult to know what Gorky really said, but it seems that he made some allusion to Darmolatov’s hot head, and the latter "almost died like one of Chekov's clerks".)
On August 17, 1933, a photograph shows him on the ship J. V. Stalin, among some hundred and twenty writers who had just visited the recently completed White Sea-Baltic canal Darmolatov has turned old overnight, and wears sideburns à la Pushkin. In a white suit and an unbuttoned shirt, he leans on the deck railing, staring into space. The wind blows through Vera Inber's hair. Bruno Yasensky (the second from the left) raises his hand toward the invisible foggy shore. With his hand cupped to his ear, Zoshchenko tries to make out the melody played by the band. The sounds are scattered by the wind and the noise of the water spilling over the floodgate.
His appearance notwithstanding, there are irrefutable proofs that Darmolatov was at this time in the grip of a psychological malady: he washed his hands in methyl alcohol and saw an informer in everyone. They persistently visited him, unannounced and without knocking, wearing colorful cravats, like lovers of poetry, or like translators, bringing miniature Eiffel Towers made of gold tin, or like plumbers, with enormous guns in their back pockets instead of plungers.
In November, he arrived at the hospital, where they treated him with sleep cures: he slept through five full weeks in the sterile landscape of hospital rooms, and from that time on it was as if worldly clamor could never reach him again. Even the terrible ukulele of the poet Kirsanov, on the other side of the partition, was muffled by cotton covered with a thin layer of ear ointment. At the intervention of the Writers Union, he was given permission to visit the town's stables twice a week; they would see him, awkward and heavy, with the first signs of elephantiasis, riding a tame horse from the stables at a trot. Before Mandelstam's departure for Samatiha (where prison and destruction awaited him), he and his wife dropped in to say good-bye to Darmolatov, They found him in front of the elevator in a funny riding habit with a child's tiny whip in his hand. A taxi had just arrived and he hurried away to the stables, without saying good-bye to his childhood friend.
In the summer of 1947, he arrived at Cetinje, in Montenegro, for the jubilee of The Mountain Wreath, fragments of which, it seems, he was translating. Although well on in years, ungainly and clumsy, he stepped lightly over the red silk ribbon separating Njegoš's gigantic chair, which looked like the throne of a god, from the poets and mortals. I who am telling this story stood to one side and watched the uninvited poet squirming in Njegoš's high austere chair; taking advantage of the applause, I slipped out of the portrait gallery in order not to witness the scandal that the intervention of my uncle, the museum curator, would cause. But I distinctly remember that between the poet's spread legs, under his threadbare pants, the horrible swelling was already visible. Before the terrible disease tied him to his bed, he spent the last year of his life quietly, chewing the sweet cud of his youth. He used to visit Anna Andreyevna, and once, they say, he brought her a flower.
POSTSCRIPT
He remains a medical phenomenon in Russian literature; Darmolatov's case was entered in all the latest pathology textbooks. A photograph of his scrotum, the she of the biggest collective farm pumpkin, is also reprinted in foreign medical books, wherever elephantiasis (elephantiasis nostras) is mentioned, and as a moral for writers that to write one must have more than big balls.
Afterword
About twenty years ago, the bookstore which I frequented in Bloomington, Indiana, began to carry the Penguin "Writers from the Other Europe" series. Every title was chosen with care, translated with felicity, and intelligently introduced (the Joseph Brodsky introduction to the volume now in your hands being in my opinion the most impressive of an excellent lot). How can I describe the impression that these books made on me? I was a lonely, homely teenager who felt as stifled by the heartland as ever did any Trotsky or Emma Bovary. Although Bloomington was a college town, Indiana remained a typically American bastion of complacent parochialism, of brutal commercialism, indeed of anti-intellectuaiism and jingoism. Not far away, the Ku Klux Klan still paraded in Martinsville. The John Burch Society for its part helpfully spotlighted anti-American subversion. I was beaten up on the school bus two or three times by big, tall, stinking boys who called themselves “grits,” They explained that it disgusted them to see somebody like me, who wore glasses and was always reading a book (this four-letter word, of course, being the worst of the obscenities they threw my way). I hasten to add that on the whole my high school years in Indiana were not unpleasant, thanks to the native friendliness of most Midwesterners. If I had to choose, I'd rather associate with kind people than with interesting or intellectual people who were not kind. Most Hoosiers, after all, were decent enough. And some of my friends had a kindred curiosity about the larger world; I’ve kept my ties with them to this day. As for the others, if I can understand why Greenland Eskimos or Quebecois Francophones want to preserve their own ways of life, how could I fault my own fellow citizens for not being cosmopolitan? It’s just that many, many things lay beyond the pale in Indiana. The bigotry and the hypocrisy were far less unnerving to me than the proud and cheerful ignorance-an all-American trait which continues to appall me to this day. Our government’s military adventurism and capricious acts of repression around the world, our own disproportionate responsibility as American consumers for the degradation of the global environment, the murderous corruption of our “war on drugs,” the ongoing domestic war against freedom of speech, and all the other rather unremarkable failings of a given nation at a given time-well, not many Americans waste much thought on them. I did not have the experience to comprehend all this twenty years ago. But I knew that I was missing something. There had to be more than this.